Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Chomsky: "Who Owns the World" and Some Empirical Data

Majia here: Here is an excerpt from an essay I wrote about consolidation of ownership of the world's resources:

Emerging in the aftermath of the global financial crisis that began in late
2007 is a world order dominated by a few governments and corporations that have
unprecedented control over global resources and appear to have
little-to-no-regard for the welfare of the vast majority of the world’s
populace, even within developed economies such as the U.S. and Japan. Within
the U.S., government prioritization of
corporate interests over public welfare during the financial crisis was
reflected in the lopsided allocation of funds to banks, including the bailout
of investment banks that should not have been eligible for relief, and the
unlimited backstopping of AIG’s credit default swaps while average Americans,
who saw work hours and income collapse, received little-to-no support. During
the height of the great financial crisis, secret Federal Reserve loans to the
biggest banks totaling $7.7 trillion enabled them to reap $13 billion in
profits.[i] U.S homeowners, who faced around $6.5
million in delinquent and foreclosed mortgages, saw little to no relief.”[ii]
In 2009, Graham Bowley reported in The
New York Times that the federal financial “bailout helps fuel a new era of
Wall Street wealth” enabling “hefty bonuses” to corporate Wall Street
executives.[iii]
Goldman Sachs alone received $70 billion in combined funds from TARP, the
Federal Reserve, AIG, and the FDIC.[iv]As of 2010, six U.S. banks, held
assets in excess of 63 percent of the U.S. Gross Domestic.[v] Perhaps
most telling, the US government largely declined to prosecute those financial
agents responsible for the crisis within these monopolists, many of which
profited from rampant foreclosure fraud in the wake of the crisis.Reflecting on these data, Economist Simon Johnson observed: "The
US increasingly displays characteristics that we have seen many times in
middle-income “emerging markets” – new dimensions of vast inequality, forms of
financial instability that benefit the best connected, and consistently easy
credit for the privileged."[vi]

Monopolies by large corporations are not
restricted to finance: carbon-based and nuclear energy industries are also
consolidated. Nuclear and carbon energy industries are extraordinarily
consolidated internationally and exert undue influence on regulators, leading
to severe accidents threatening human health. Despite the considerable lobbying
of the global nuclear industry, six countries generate 73 percent (in 2009) of
the world’s nuclear power.[vii]
The largest privately held players in nuclear engineering include Mitsubishi
Heavy Industries, General Electric, Hitachi, Toshiba, Alstom, USEC, Cameco, and
Shanghai Electric. State owned groups include Areva, Rosatom, AECL, and Korean Electric Power
Corporation (KEPCO).[viii]
Six companies - GE and Westinghouse of America, Areva of France, and Toshiba,
Hitachi and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries – have dominated the industry for
decades.[ix] Often
times, as in the case in Japan, national regulatory agencies both promote and
regulate the nuclear industry.[x] In
the US the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is technically separate from the
Department of Energy, which promotes nuclear power; although empirical analysis
suggests that the NRC also promotes nuclear energy. The US nuclear industry was de-regulated in
the 1990s, resulting in market consolidation. Davis and Wolfram reported in
2011 that the three largest nuclear energy companies control more than one
third of all US nuclear capacity.[xi]
Operations of nuclear power plants are also highly consolidated. Exelon, formed
in 2011, is the largest nuclear power operator in the USA and the third largest
in the world.[xii]
Nuclear energy is extraordinarily expensive to run and the aging infrastructure
of most of the world’s nuclear plants will cause costs to rise still farther.[xiii]However, this powerful industry has launched international public relations and
sales campaigns aimed at promoting expansion of nuclear power globally as a
“green” source of energy despite the intensive carbon expenditures required to
mine, process and decommission nuclear fuel. The lack of regulatory oversight
by Japan’s nuclear regulatory agency contributed directly to the ongoing
Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan.

The oil and gas industry are also highly
consolidated and extraordinarily powerful. In 2009, five oil companies topped the list of the
top 25 global energy companies: Exxon Mobil Corp Chevron Corp, Royal Dutch
Shell, BP, and Total SA.[xiv]
The oil supermajors’ annual profits exceed the Gross Domestic Product of many
nations and their influence is seemingly unlimited. The oil “supermajors” power
is limited more by the rise of national oil companies that assert rights to
control many of the world’s largest oil reserves than it is limited by national
regulations. In the U.S., the supermajors have essentially corrupted the
government’s extractive industries’ regulatory arm, the Minerals Management
Service (MMS).[xv] These
industries have pushed for more access to offshore oil and gas deposits,
sidelining concerns by environmentalists and citizens concerned about impacts
on their communities. The lack of regulatory oversight and cost-cutting
practices by the supermajors were directly responsible for major oil
environmental disasters in the US, including the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 and
the BP oil spill in 2010.[xvi]

The global influence of the nuclear and carbon
industries is perhaps unprecedented, approached only by the influence of
banking and arms’ producers. Decades of unbridled power have shaped the
worldview of those in these industries. They are prone to disregard the
externalities of their operations on publics globally and have historically
fought aggressively against any new technologies seen as limiting their future
influence. Infrastructures built in the post-World War II era in developed
economies, particularly the U.S., ensure public dependence upon oil for
transportation while the consumer culture fostered during that seem period
requires ever-larger amounts of electricity generation to feed consumer
machines and automated production. Dependence upon ceaseless energy production
is an important component of the crux of these industries’ influence. Yet, the
effluents from these industries are steadily making the world unfit for human
habitation. Despite increasingly apocalyptic accidents, such as the Fukushima
nuclear and BP oil accidents, these industries remain hegemonic in large part
because of their strategic influence and the vested interests benefitting from
ownership. The five largest oil companies generated profits in 2011 of $375
million per day, or $137 billion a year.[xvii]
Over 50 percent of profits were dedicated to stock re-purchases benefitting
board members, senior managers, and the largest shareholders. The oil and gas
industry spent $150 million on lobbying in the US in 2011.

Ownership of the world’s resources, including stock
in the powerful industries of banking and energy, tends to be very consolidated.
Globally, in 2006, prior to the Great Recession, one percent of the world’s
population was believed to control forty percent of the world’s wealth.[xviii]
One analysis of 43,000 global corporations revealed a core group of 1318
corporations with interlocking ownerships.[xix] The
study, conducted by Stefania Vitali, James B. Glattfelder, and Stefano
Battiston, used network analysis to explicate the degree of consolidation of
corporate control. Their findings revealed unprecedented global consolidation
of corporate ownership and control. Each of the core 1318 corporations had ownership
links to two or more other companies, although most were linked to twenty other
corporations. The 1318 corporations owned through their shares the majority of
blue chip and manufacturing companies, controlling sixty percent of global
revenues. Further analysis revealed a tightly linked “super entity” of 147
corporations, mainly in finance, with interconnected ownership. Consequently,
less than one percent of corporations essentially controlled forty percent of
the entire network. Furthermore, the study found that 734 “top holders of stock
accumulate 80% of the control over the value of all TNCs.” The authors
conclude: “this means that network control is much more unequally distributed
than wealth. In particular, the top ranked actors hold a control ten times
bigger than what could be expected based on their wealth.”[xx]

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).